Past ICO SCAM Analysis

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: MedicalChain in Severe Pain After Overdose



The trillion-dollar healthcare industry is ready for Blockchain, but data and patient privacy are at stake

Doctor, doctor, give me the news! I have got a bad case of MedicalChain blues! Medicalchain is just as it sounds, a Blockchain used to maintain medical records. It was developed in the UK by an innovator, who had been working in the UK’s National Health Service, and discovered a better way to maintain medical records.

Financials

MedicalChain had a big ICO, where it raised some $24 mln in 30 days from Feb. 1, 2018 to March 1, 2018. The ERC20 token debuted at $0.25 and started its downward trend to $0.17 at the time of writing. It had a market capitalization of $32 mln and 500 mln medtokens in circulation. It is ranked 297 on CoinMarketCap. It is currently listed on Huobi Pro, Kucoin, Gate.io, Coinbene, and QRYPTOS exchanges.

Take control of your medical records

Medical records are similar to your “permanent record” from high school, which your teachers used to threaten you with. “This transgression will go on your permanent record from which it can never be expunged,” teachers used to say. 

They got your records with information about you, but you are never allowed to see them nor have them in your own possession. But unlike the high school records, in the U.S. at least, all you have to do is ask for a copy. But what is stopping us from doing that? Trust?

MedicalChain claims to give you back the ownership over your personal information. A decentralized platform that enables secure, fast and transparent exchange and usage of medical data, it introduces utilization of Blockchain technology to store patient health records and maintain a single version of the patient’s true data.

MedicalChain aims at enabling healthcare agents such as doctors, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacists and insurers to request permission to access and interact with medical records. Each interaction is auditable, transparent, and secure, and will be recorded as a transaction on Medicalchain’s distributed ledger.

Moreover, no privacy is lost in this process; MedicalChain is built on the permission-based Hyperledger Fabric architecture which allows varying access levels; patients control who can view their records, how much they see and for what length of time.

So far MedicalChain is only accepting reservations for its services in the UK. However, it would like to expand to the United States and globally.

Hot market 

The US is a hot market in all aspects medicine because of all the hospitals, healthcare organizations, and the massive industry itself and ancillary markets. Despite the cornucopia of partnerships that are readily available in the US, Medicalchain is not seeking to partner with hospitals and healthcare organizations or government, but instead is approaching the patients directly and offering for them to have their records on their platform regardless of which healthcare organization they belong to. This is in general and not only directed at the US.

The team

Dr. Adbdullah Albeyatti

Dr. Albeyatti graduated from Imperial College London as a doctor in 2011. He has always had a passion for innovation and problem solving and has developed solutions to inefficiencies he found whilst working in the UK National Health Service.

Mo Tayeb

Mo is the co-founder and chief operations officer of MedicalChain. He is a graduate from Brunel University from where he obtained a degree in e-commerce. He also holds an Executive MBA from University of Oxford, Saïd Business School.

Newborn learning to walk or bedridden cripple?

MedicalChain has a great service for a multi-trillion-dollar industry that grows larger each year. It is still very new to the market and needs more time to evolve before its trajectory is set. However, the depreciating medtoken is a worrisome sign to some or a buy signal to others. 

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

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[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Crystal Ball Cloudy For Gnosis



A crystal-ball crypto? Not exactly, but crowdsourced predictive analytics does hold some truth

In a short time, Blockchain and cryptocurrency technology have come a long way, but  crypto that can predict the future? Now, that might sound like a late night psychic scam, but this Blockchain is looking back into the past to better gauge the future. Gnosis, Greek for knowledge of spiritual mysteries, is centered on the prediction market.

Financials

Gnosis entered the market over one year ago on May 1, 2017, at $51.64, at the time of writing, it is trading at $96.39, almost a 100 percent gain! Not bad for a soothsaying crypto. The one-day ICO held on April 24, 2017, raised $12.5 mln in capital for Gnosis. The market cap is $106 mln and the CoinMarketCap rank is 143.

So you mean to tell me, you can see the future?

Prediction markets are sometimes called information markets, idea futures, event derivatives, decision markets or virtual stock markets. In essence, a prediction market is a vehicle for aggregating information about the expected outcome of a future event. How does the system work? Participants receive a set of tokens reflecting each possible outcome and may then trade these with either other market participants or a market maker. This is essentially betting on the outcome of said event.

The current market price reflects the probability of the specific outcome to occur. The set of outcome tokens has to cover all possible outcomes so that the probability of all outcomes adds up to 100 percent. Once the event outcome is known, the winning outcome has a probability of 100 percent and is worth one, while all other losing outcomes have the probability of zero percent and are worth zero. Gnosis uses the crowdsourced information to make predictions about the event.

There is an old anecdote about the more people guessing the weight of a cow, the more accurate the number will be. Besides the crowdsourced guesses, an ultimate oracle would settle the outcomes of the events and thusly the disputes. However, the oracle should be an independently controlled mechanism to achieve the most fairness.

Dual-token system

Gnosis incorporates the use of two ERC20 tokens, Gnosis (GNO) and Gnosis Wizard (WIZ). The GNO token has a fixed supply of 10 mln GNO tokens. The company plans to charge for the use of certain services that operate on the core platform. Fees will be payable in ETH, BTC or WIZ. This is similar to the gas model on the Ethereum smart contracts: pay to play. According to the website and some further investigating,  WIZ is generated by holders of GNO. WIZ tokens will be pegged at or very near $1. It’s important that the WIZ token maintain low volatility to serve as a vehicle of collateral on the platform.

Crystal ball cloudy for Gnosis

While the company has been around for over five years already, according to their timeline, there are still many implementations to be done before the software is up and running. It appears that Q3 2018 will be the time that the technology will be fully operational.

Out of many of the ICOs of 2017, it is one of the few that has managed to keep its token price above the ICO debut price, showing it has potential. However, on the flipside, it is a crowdsourced-predictive analytics system. A crowdsourced system could only be as good as the crowd participating in it. Care to cast a wager on Gnosis? Will it succeed? Will it fail? Choose wisely, chosen one!

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

[vlom]

Past ICO Review: Polkadot, Wait, What Does it Do?

It’s a rather curious case about Polkadot. If you ask around, not many have heard of the coin, which has raised some $345 mln! The ICO is one-year long starting on Oct. 14, 2017 and ending Oct. 14, 2018. The previous figure is from a three-day auction that took place the during the launch of the year-long ICO.

the only ICO in your list i put money in.
there wasent a year-long ICO. that not true. it took place between 15 OCT – 27 OCT 2017.

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Polkadot, Wait, What Does it Do?

It’s a rather curious case about Polkadot. If you ask around, not many have heard of the coin, which has raised some $345 mln! The ICO is one-year long starting on Oct. 14, 2017 and ending Oct. 14, 2018. The previous figure is from a three-day auction that took place the during the launch of the year-long ICO.

the only ICO in your list i put money in.
there wasent a year-long ICO. that not true. it took place between 15 OCT – 27 OCT 2017.

Thanks. We will explore

[vlom]

you can just check their twitter account:

https://twitter.com/polkadotnetwork/status/923830921563910144
posted: 27th October 2017:

The word is out -- our #PolkadotNetwork has ended. Thank you for the overwhelming support - the @web3foundation team #decentralize #web3

Polkadot
‏@polkadotnetwork
14 Oct 2017

More
We’re almost 24 hours before the end of the countdown. Please register via #PICOPS https://picops.parity.io  asap @ParityTech

or have a look here:

https://hacked.com/ico-update-polkadot/

Investment Details
Type: Dutch Auction Crowdsale
Pre-Sale: Ongoing
Opening Sale: Oct. 15, 2017
End Date; Oct. 28, 2017
Platform: Native
Token Release: Genesis Block (Q3 2019)
Total Supply: 5 million out of 10 million total allocated to Genesis
Payments Accepted: ETH

[Dany44]

you can just check their twitter account:

https://twitter.com/polkadotnetwork/status/923830921563910144
posted: 27th October 2017:

The word is out -- our #PolkadotNetwork has ended. Thank you for the overwhelming support - the @web3foundation team #decentralize #web3

Polkadot
‏@polkadotnetwork
14 Oct 2017

More
We’re almost 24 hours before the end of the countdown. Please register via #PICOPS https://picops.parity.io  asap @ParityTech

or have a look here:

https://hacked.com/ico-update-polkadot/

Investment Details
Type: Dutch Auction Crowdsale
Pre-Sale: Ongoing
Opening Sale: Oct. 15, 2017
End Date; Oct. 28, 2017
Platform: Native
Token Release: Genesis Block (Q3 2019)
Total Supply: 5 million out of 10 million total allocated to Genesis
Payments Accepted: ETH

Thanks again! We have already made corrections on site and here on forum

[Dany44]

Top 10 ICOs by Funds Raised, From Filecoin to TRON



The top 10 ICOs by funds raised have a combined total of $1.4 bln

1. FileCoin $257 Mln
2. Tezos $232 Mln
3. Paragon $183 Mln
4. Finney $158 Mln
5. Bancor $153 Mln
6. Status $102 Mln
7. Kin $98 Mln
8. Elastos $94 Mln
9. TenX  $80 Mln
10. Tron  $70 Mln

The past year has had much excitement in the crypto market with ICOs becoming a mainstream event and seeing a lot of headlines in the news. The following is a review of the top 10 ICO by the amount of funds raised.

1. FileCoin $257 Mln

The true king of the crypto ICOs, FileCoin raised the most. FileCoin is offering a decentralized storage service with ultra-competitive rates for users. Other users can rent out their storage space for payment in filecoin. The token is trading at $11.21 down from a high of $27 in December 2017. Currently, they are accepting early miners in the pilot program. It is too hard to tell if/when FileCoin’s decentralized storage system will get off the ground.

2. Tezos $232 Mln

Tezos erupted onto the market with its astounding $232 mln ICO, but quickly lost control of most of its funds due to infighting and now trying to stave off pending legal cases. These legal cases are based on infighting between partners, which has caused the company to halt work. In more recent developments, some of the partners have gone rogue and pushed ahead with development. Despite the deluge of bad news, that would usually decimate a company’s stock price, Tezos token has appreciated, causing some to believe that it will actually be worth something in the end.

3. Paragon $183 Mln

Despite raising more than $100 mln during the ICO, the token price tanked a day after the launch starting at $1.68 per token and falling to $0.48 only three days later. On Dec. 21, 2017, there seemed to be something of a pump and dump when the token price surged to an all-time high of $4.11 and then crashed back down $0.52. Paragon is currently trading at $0.28 at time of writing. It suffers from the debilitating effects the Marijuana grey zone that is found in the US: some states approve it, but the federal government says its illegal. This is a big no go for financial institutions that are obedient to the feds.

4. Finney $158 Mln

Sirin labs have used Finney as an ICO to raise some massive funding to run a project on Blockchain-powered devices such as smartphones and computers, citing that traditional operating systems are vulnerable to hacking and leave users exposed to risk. Finney is the name of the smartphone that is currently in development, and in April 2018, it was announced that electronics manufacturer Foxconn will work with Sirin to produce the phone. Furthermore, Sirin Labs plans to deliver a “decentralized app store run by the community” where “cost-bearing apps are based on a secure P2P resource-sharing system, which distributes fees between users and developers.” However, which community are they talking about? This leaves a lot of questions to be answered.

5. Bancor $153 Mln

The Bancor Protocol is a technical revolution allowing tokens to be converted without matching two parties with different wants. The magic is in the math, with a simple formula balancing buys and sells so that every token in the network maintains a formulaic relationship to others. The result is continuous liquidity regardless of trade volume or exchange listings. When Bancor token debuted on July 17, 2017, it entered the market at $4.49 per token. By November 2017, it has crashed down to $2 per token losing 50 percent of its value in four to five months.

6. Status $102 Mln

Being Ethereum’s browsing tool for searching and making payments, on the side of representing a messaging application, Status has raised a substantial amount of funding despite not being too well known outside of the smaller circles. Status trades at $0.11 up from the entrance price of $0.06 from late June 2017.

7. Kin $98 Mln

The Kin Ecosystem Foundation aims to bring all digital communications under one umbrella, such as chat apps and social networks. The ERC20 token will be used for all transactions in the Kin Ecosystem. It has attracted the attention of many investors, as it raised a substantial amount in its ICO. However, in March it was announced that Stellar would be taking over as the payment system: “Kin transactions will now take place side-by-side on Stellar and Ethereum, unlocking faster transactions for digital services, while continuing to provide liquidity to Kin holders,” according to a press release on PR Newswire. This raises doubts about whether the currency can function as no Dapps of Kin have been launched.

8. Elastos $94 Mln

Elastos’ technology attempts to create a new kind of Internet, powered by Blockchain technology. On this new Internet, people will be able to own digital assets and generate wealth from them. The goal is to create an Internet that allows users to access articles, movies and games directly, without going through a media player or another platform intermediary. Elastos will use Blockchain technology to issue IDs for digital content, making it possible to know who owns which digital assets. It recently had its ICO in February 2018, since then the token price has returned close to its introductory price of $44.

9. TenX  $80 Mln

TenX is making crypto more of a tangible payment system by creating actual debit cards that are linked to a TenX wallet. The company has a forthcoming banking license in the works and intends on taking its everyday payment system mainstream. With technology like this, it is surprising that the company did not raise more in its ICO. The TenX token has been on a steady decline since its release with an all-time high of $5.26 during the 2017 December rally down to $1.25 as of mid-May 2018. The token price might not go to the moon, but the debit card might end up in a few wallets.

10. Tron  $70 Mln

Tron made a big splash onto headlines in December 2017, as its technology is set on decentralizing the entertainment industry. The idea was to enable compensation for content creators, such as singer/songwriters, artists, bands, performers, and anyone who is an entertainer. Hitting an all-time high in December at $0.25, it has crashed to only $0.07 and remained there, as there has been lots of controversy on whether this is a scam or a legitimate token.

You may find Past ICO Reviews HERE

[allahabadi]

Top 10 ICOs by Funds Raised, From Filecoin to TRON
-snip-

https://icodrops.com/bankex/ Bankex raised over 70.5Mill $, so it should be over Tron...

MobileGo did 100+Mill

[Dany44]

Top 10 ICOs by Funds Raised, From Filecoin to TRON
-snip-

https://icodrops.com/bankex/ Bankex raised over 70.5Mill $, so it should be over Tron...

MobileGo did 100+Mill

It can be so about Bankex. 0,5 M$ is not such a big difference, if we are talking about 10th place.

I found 53M $ in MobileGo thread

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: BOScoin Great Tech, But Who Knows About it?



Easy to read and write contracts are great, but is there public attention?

South Korean-based BOScoin or in long form, the Blockchain Operating System is an ERC20 based coin that has “trust contracts” regarded as easier to understand and write by humans. The network is self-evolving, in which each node has a vote and the nodes of the network vote on software updates and other matters. The nodes are referred to as congress. The block size is dynamic and the block interval is every five seconds. BOScoin can process 1,000 transactions per seconds which give it much-needed bandwidth.

Impressive ICO, lackluster token performance

BOScoin had an ICO on May 10, 2017 and raised $12 mln from it. The token started trading much later on Oct. 25, 2017 at $0.71. Since then it has seen some great gains in January 2018, up to $5.00 at some points, but has since then fallen down to $0.19 at the time of writing. Its market cap is $85 mln and its CoinMarketCap rank is 166.

Trust contracts are easy to write, easy to read

The big differences here are the trust contracts are written in Timed Automata language, which makes it easy to read and write a BOS smart contract, because they are understandable before they are executed. A problem that many are seeing today with smart contracts is that the programming language is hard to understand, which makes the contracts hard to read or write in code. That, in its turn, leads to the need of having to hire someone who can decipher the language.

Solidity is the programing language of Ethereum’s smart contracts. It is a contract-oriented, high-level language for implementing smart contracts. It was influenced by C++, Python and JavaScript and is designed to target the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Leaders of the Pack

Changki Park- Former Samsung employee who worked in financials before. He also created Paxnet, an information portal for South Korean investors, which has had some success.

Yezune Choi- He is the inventor of the trust contract and has more than 20 years of experience in software development.

It’s a sure-unsure bet

BOSCoin has some interesting features and it could have potential for wider adoption. However, it is still relatively obscure. The need for a user-friendly smart contract system presents the market with much opportunity.

However, one drawback is that the existence of Ethereum and its success in the market means that people may choose to develop on it instead, for fear of betting on something that could fail. This tried-and-true approach is something that is detrimental to BOScoin.

But the user friendliness is something that could win over a lot of people, and get them to say “hey, this is a great tool to write smart contacts and not need someone with a Blockchain background to do it.” This saves time, money, and allows more people to get into Blockchain technology without the high level of knowledge.

Finally, the obscureness of it and lack of attention sometimes harm a coin’s reputation, because there is no one else using it, so there must be something wrong with its mentality.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: How Aragon Freedom Fighters Gained Traction




Fighting for freedom in the digital age, how one startup wants to liberate the world

Everyone knows someone who talks a mile a minute, while how about an ICO that raised a million dollars per minute for 26 minutes?! Shocked? Go ahead and pinch yourself, you are not dreaming. Aragon raised 25 mln in 26 minutes, it hit its record 26-min ICO on May 18, 2017. Aragon entered the market the same day at $1.49 per token and has risen 184.5 percent up to 4.24 at the time of writing. It has a market cap of $112 mln and ranked at 135 on CoinMarketCap.

Create and run an organization out of the box

Aragon is a Dapp on the Ethereum Blockchain, ERC20 token, that allows the user to create, run and manage a decentralized organization. The company’s motto is to put power back to the people. According to the website, “We want to empower people across the world to easily and securely manage their organizations. We provide the tools for anyone to become an entrepreneur and run their own organization, to take control of their own lives.”

The company has essentially created a smart-contract Blockchain software that works without having a Blockchain expert on staff.

Blockchain experts are not just growing on trees! Not having a Blockchain expert on staff is cited as one of the many reasons why companies are hesitant to enter into the new space. Blockchain is a powerful tool but with great power come great responsibility. Many company heads are fearful of putting up any sensitive information that could remain on the chain forever.

How is it different? How is it not?

Oh? So it’s like the others? You can use it to vote, hold elections and keep contracts in place? Yes, that’s right, just like the others, which in a large sea of competition, it is easy to get lost or confused with others. So what sets Aragon apart from the others? FREEDOM! The team behind the tech are concerned about the future at the crossroads of technology and humanity because technology is either going to lead to a more transparent, free, open society or it will aid more oppression, surveillance and confinement of society.

The team would rather not see that and so they chose to fight for freedom and fight they do by offering easy to use tech for organizations to become decentralized and stick it to the “digital man.” This idea has become popular with many in the cryptocurrency community because of its ability to increase efficiency, and participate in the first decentralized autonomous organization focused on digital jurisdiction, upgradeability and functional governance.

El Grupo

Luis Cuende

Is listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 and MIT Tech review. He founded Stampery, a time-stamping project in the Blockchain ecosystem. His has experience working with the likes of the Estonian government, Microsoft and Telefonica.

Jorge Izquierdo

Having created various popular applications, with accolades ranging from receiving a Thiel fellowship and a WWDC scholarship by Apple at a tender age of 15 as one of the most promising young app developers.

Gaining traction? Supporters, yes. Projects?

While it does not sound as exciting as asking oracles to peer into crystal balls and predict the future, the company is growing its following. More than 750 organizations are using the Aragon’s testnet and the Slack channel has more than 500 members.

While Aragon is building a following online, there are still some features that need to be implemented such as digital arbitrage. Additionally, the token price has been rather stable, only showing growth in the past two months - perhaps due to support from the Slack users? If Aragon cannot implement its software, it is not going to go anywhere fast except faded memory.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

[allahabadi]

Top 10 ICOs by Funds Raised, From Filecoin to TRON
-snip-

https://icodrops.com/bankex/ Bankex raised over 70.5Mill $, so it should be over Tron...

MobileGo did 100+Mill

It can be so about Bankex. 0,5 M$ is not such a big difference, if we are talking about 10th place.

I found 53M $ in MobileGo thread

Can u find anything on the Venezuelan Petro ?

[Dany44]

Top 10 ICOs by Funds Raised, From Filecoin to TRON
-snip-

https://icodrops.com/bankex/ Bankex raised over 70.5Mill $, so it should be over Tron...

MobileGo did 100+Mill

It can be so about Bankex. 0,5 M$ is not such a big difference, if we are talking about 10th place.

I found 53M $ in MobileGo thread

Can u find anything on the Venezuelan Petro ?

It's gonna be interesting, have Petro already finished tokensale?

[allahabadi]

Top 10 ICOs by Funds Raised, From Filecoin to TRON
-snip-

https://icodrops.com/bankex/ Bankex raised over 70.5Mill $, so it should be over Tron...

MobileGo did 100+Mill

It can be so about Bankex. 0,5 M$ is not such a big difference, if we are talking about 10th place.

I found 53M $ in MobileGo thread

Can u find anything on the Venezuelan Petro ?

It's gonna be interesting, have Petro already finished tokensale?

WRT MobileGo

https://icodrops.com/mobilego/

[Dany44]

Top 10 ICOs by Funds Raised, From Filecoin to TRON
-snip-

https://icodrops.com/bankex/ Bankex raised over 70.5Mill $, so it should be over Tron...

MobileGo did 100+Mill

It can be so about Bankex. 0,5 M$ is not such a big difference, if we are talking about 10th place.

I found 53M $ in MobileGo thread

Can u find anything on the Venezuelan Petro ?

It's gonna be interesting, have Petro already finished tokensale?

WRT MobileGo

https://icodrops.com/mobilego/

ICOBench says 53 M $

and as I said offcial thread of MobileGo pointed 53 M $ too

Who to trust?)

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: Filecoin the True King of the Crypto Hill



While Filecoin raised the most out of any ICO to date, its technology is not novel and it will face competition

...And that hill is the pile of cash it sits on valued at $257 mln raised in its ICO which ran from Aug. 10, 2017 to Sept. 7th, 2017. It had a funding goal of $40 mln and its initial token price was $5. The token has done well, doubling to $10.67 which is an ROI of 113 percent if you got in for a five spot.

Decentralized storage

Blockchain is all about decentralization, it is about keeping what is yours, yours, by breaking it apart and giving it to various strangers around the world to hold onto. This sorta sounds like and Indiana Jones’ adventure.

By decentralizing, you are keeping your data safer than if it were all stored in one central location. If the hackers breach security at Google, then your drive contents are going to be compromised.

If you cut your data up and disperse it, it will be a lot safer.

However, that comes with its own downside, if you lose your encryption keys or passwords, your bits of data are going to be lost forever, untraceable and unclaimable. While it is not a new idea, Filecoin has won over investors with well-planned marketing strategies, which are ever so important in the 2018 ICO sphere.

Filecoin is a project that was started by Protocol Labs, which has a mission to develop tools for the Internet.

Their belief is that the Internet is humankind’s most important invention and their intention is to develop advanced tools to develop and assist society.

There are 15 core members of the team, too many to list here, and more than double the number of contributors working with Protocol Labs.

Note that not all these individuals work on FileCoin. Filecoin is only one of four other projects the company is currently developing.

IPFS as opposed to HTTPS

Perhaps you have not heard of Interplanetary File System (IPFS), which is a developing technology to replace the current Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. Here is a quick lesson on what IPFS does when you add a file:

- Each file and all of the blocks within it are given a unique fingerprint called a cryptographic hash.

- IPFS removes duplicates across the network and tracks version history for every file.

- Each network node stores only content it is interested in, and some indexing information that helps figure out who is storing what.

- When looking up files, you're asking the network to find nodes storing the content behind a unique hash.

- Every file can be found by human-readable names using a decentralized naming system called IPNS.

Enter the Gladiators

While Filecoin is pretty neat, raised a ton of money, and has a great team behind it, it is entering a market with many competitors.

Filecoin is not a one-and-done solution, if someone can do the same work for a cheaper price, then well you know the story; they are going to go for the cheaper price.

It looks like 2018 and beyond will start to see the successful ICOs battle it out for market control in the new emerging blockchain economy. The second half of 2018 and well into 2019 and beyond will see a rise in competition among the providers of similar services.

It will be an interesting time to observe how these companies compete and how it affects token prices.

Furthermore, and what is most important is that these companies first get the products or services on the market before we can start to see the business plan in action and if this token-based model can compete with the companies on wall street.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

[Dany44]

Past ICO Review: TenX Puts Crypto on Debit Card, Hodlers Beware



Spend crypto with a debit card and an app but what about the fees?

TenX is making crypto more of a tangible payment system by creating actual debit cards that are linked to a TenX wallet.

The company has a forthcoming banking license in the works and intends on taking its everyday payment system mainstream. With technology like this, it is surprising that the company did not raise more in its ICO; it raised $80 mln, which is still a substantial amount of capital, but for the innovative service it is offering, it is surprising that it was not able to garner more support.

The token started out strong, entering the market at $0.83. The TenX token has been on a steady decline since its release with an all-time high of $5.26 during the 2017 December rally down to $1.01 as May 2018 closes out.

The token price might not go to the moon, but the debit card might end up in a few wallets.

Who is using it?

While it is a step in the right direction to get crypto to become more of a mainstream and daily use commodity, there are still the Hodlers out there, who are seemingly never going to spend their crypto. This technology would not appeal to them.

However, for the people who do want to spend crypto TenX provides that service via a debit card and an app. TenX’s motto is: “At TenX we work on making any Blockchain asset spendable instantly.”

TenX works with credit card providers to connect the COMIT transaction network to a payment card, allowing you to quickly and safely convert cryptocurrency funds into card transactions.

Currently, TenX supports Bitcoin, Dash and Ether, but the system is capable of supporting most Blockchain assets and the company plans to expand offerings in the future.

Conversions, fees, the general cost of doing payments

While the idea of using crypto is novel and exciting for many, there are a variety of fees that, to many consumers, would be off-putting.

When you can use your debit or credit card to do the same thing for free, why would you want to pay the fees and have crypto conversions to another crypto and then into fiat? Therein, lies the biggest problem.

There are too many conversions and too many associated fees and costs. While the site states that there are zero percent conversion fees, there are surely costs, but they are being absorbed by the company.

TenX does offer an incentive, similar to what the credit card companies do, but users get a different incentive than cash back or points.

TenX distributes tokens in the amount of 0.1 percent of purchases. Additionally, a reserve of 0.5 percent of the payment volume on the network is periodically distributed to holders of PAY tokens in proportion to their holdings. TenX plans to distribute this incentive monthly at first, with hopes of increasing distribution frequency in the future.

Looking into it further, there is discussion on Reddit on who is using the card, and it seems many people are using it in Australia successfully. There appears to be no public information on how many users TenX has.

We can only assume some pilot programs are running around the world with limited numbers of people signed up.

Building base, gearing up

While the company has some innovative ideas on how to spend almost any crypto via debit card and app, there will be competition from the likes of Bitpay and mainstays such as Visa and Mastercard, if they get into the crypto payments game.

There could be a lot at stake, but without risk, there is no reward.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

[Dany44]

Past-ICO Review: Finney, the Blockchain Phone Ahead of its Time?



The Blockchain-powered phone is here, but is the world ready for it?

Sirin labs have used Finney as an ICO to raise some massive funding to run a project on Blockchain-powered devices such as smartphones and computers, citing that traditional operating systems are vulnerable to hacking and leave users exposed to risk.

Finney is the name of the smartphone that is currently in development, and in April 2018, it was announced that electronics manufacturer Foxconn will work with Sirin to produce the phone.

There is another Blockchain enabled phone called Solarin and ultra-secure Blockchain phone and Sirin labs have an all-in-one Blockchain computer.

For the purpose of this article, we will stick to Finney only.

By the numbers

The Finney ICO raised some $158 mln during the massive buying fest that was in December 2017; Dec. 12-25 to be precise. The Sirin Labs’ token (SRN) debuted at $0.90 and subsequently plunged to $0.32 per token, a loss of 64 percent of value.

While the idea of a Blockchain-powered phone is novel, will there be mass adoption of the technology that fast?

The Finney phone is sold via Sirin Labs’ website for $999, which is rather expensive, but the newer iPhones are in a similar price range. However, its advanced big brother, Solarin, is selling for a whopping $13,200! That is not a typo: Thirteen-thousand two-hundred dollars. 

Phone features

Finney, Solarin and the all-in-one computer will all be powered by IOTA’s Tangle technology. The following are features that will be found on the Blockchain-based phone.

Blockchain Features

- Shield OS:

- Secure P2P resource sharing

- Built-in cold-storage crypto wallet

- Distributed Ledger Consensus

Sirin Labs Cyber Protection suite

- Behavioral-based Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)

- Blockchain-based, full tampering proof

- Physical security switch (for wallet protection)

- Secured communications (VoIP, text, email)

- Three-factor authentication: Biometric, Lock Pattern, Behavioral

Phone specs

- 5.2-inch QHD Display

- 256GB of internal memory storage

- 8GB RAM

- Wi-Fi 802.11ac

- BT 5.0

- 16MP Main camera

- 12MP Wide-Angle selfie camera

Furthermore, Sirin Labs plans to deliver a “decentralized app store run by the community” where “cost-bearing apps are based on a secure P2P resource-sharing system, which distributes fees between users and developers.”

However, which community are they talking about? This leaves a lot of questions to be answered.

Lofty sales goals

While the media has been relatively quiet about the Finny phone, it was announced in April that the Switzerland-based company said that it’s already received more than 25,000 pre-orders, and hopes to sell between 100,000 and a few million units in 2018.

Further down the line, the plan is to license its tech to other hardware brands; Sirin is said to have been in talks with Huawei about that. Foxconn is the manufacturer of Apple’s iPhone and Sirin Labs had stated that the phones should be shipping out in October of this year, putting them well within striking distance of hitting the goal of selling almost a few million units. 

The Blockchain phone ahead of its time?

While it is hard to say whether the world is ready for a Blockchain-based phone, many people think Blockchain is only Bitcoin, it does have some unique uses.

Should the company be able to achieve their goal of selling more than one mln units, then there could be some support for the phone and the continued manufacture of it. But if Sirin Labs does not sell their intended number of phones to reach their goal, then the phone was ahead of its time and the market was not there.

This will be a continuing story as we await the release of the phone in October and see if a Blockchain phone is really something the masses want to buy.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE

[Dany44]

Top 10 ICO Failures of 2017



ICOs like businesses fail too, here are some of the biggest failures of 2017

It is true that 50 percent of all businesses fail, and that is also true of ICOs- they are businesses, too. From 2017, let's take a look at the top 10 ICOs that failed the hardest, due to bad business practices, founder quarrels, poor products, or scams run by con-artists.

1. OneCoin

OneCoin could have its own article, but for the sake of space, we’ll summarize the story here. OneCoin was a true Ponzi scheme concocted by Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian national who has been previously connected with other Ponzi schemes. She founded two companies OneCoin Ltd. in Dubai and OneLife Network in Bulgaria. Between the two companies, which sold investment educational material. Later when questioned by authorities, OneCoin claimed that it only sold educational materials and was not selling tokens, when in fact they were. Buying into the “educational packages,” which were blatantly  plagiarized materials, the victims received OneCoin tokens which were used to “mine” OneCoins. Long story short, Europol got involved, the only exchange where OneCoin was worth anything (OneCoin’s own exchange) shut down and the OneCoin became zerocoin- worthless. Charges were later brought against Ignatova in India in April 2017, at a OneCoin recruiting meeting. There are accounts of her arrest several times in various countries in 2017, however these accounts appear to be false and Ignatova is at large. In Late January 2018, Bulgarian police raided the office in Sofia and officially shut it down.

2. Enigma

It is still a mystery of who hacked Enigma, which was a legitimate business at the time. Engima was rather boastful about its security and new encryption techniques ahead of its ICO. However, its security seemed subpar when all of its systems were hacked mailing list, website, and Slack channel were hacked. The hackers used the above to reach out to potential investors about a “pre-ICO sale.” Despite warnings about a scam, many still invested at hackers made off with $500,000 worth of ETH. The CEO then looked pretty bad because his account was hacked because he did not set up his two-factor authentication. Whoops.

3. Droplex

A pure rip off QRL. Without any effort, scammers copy pasted QRLs white  paper and GitHub code to their site and only replaced QRL with Droplex. When people started to become aware, the scammers slowly reacted by changing the code. In the end, the lazy scammers’ haul was about $25K. Not bad for cheaters, but in the end cheaters never win; karma will come around.

4. Coindash

Israel-based Coindash was another hacking victim. Hackers either created an identical website or diverted the wallet address to make off with more than $10 mln in stolen ICO funds. The company still managed to raise about $6.4 mln and promised to send tokens to those who donated to the hackers inadvertently. Despite this once a hack happens and money is stolen, reputations are forever damaged and it near impossible to reverse the damage.

5. Veritaseum

Hacked or inside job? Veritaseum, a p2p personal banking company, lost $5.4 mln to alleged hackers. However, it was unclear what really happened as there were many red flags about the company’s website, the technology used, and many cries from Reddit about these things and the general shadiness of how the story unfolded and the rather weak defenses the company took. The final nail in the coffin was the large sale of Veri tokens and massive price increase around the time of the sale--someone got rich fast. Who could that be?

6. Parity

Wallet hack, yes your wallet can be hacked too! Finding a vulnerability in the multi-signature wallet issued by Parity. Parity is used for building Dapps and comes with a wallet. The hacker made off with $30 mln! But the gains did not last long as other hackers were able to trace down the pathways and recover most of the funds that were stolen.

7. Swisscoin

If it’s Swiss, its usually superior quality, right? Well, not for Swisscoin, this project had more holes in than Swiss cheese. Swisscoin was touted as an instant payment system with interest-free payments. I have heard of fees for making money transfers, but who pays interest on transfers, unless they were sending loans...Logic interrupted… regardless of what they were trying to do. They were busted by the Swiss police and $500,000 of stolen cash was found, as well as a stash of weapons and ammunition. The scammers face 12 years in prison.

8. Slot N Slot

While it is not a new idea to have a Blockchain-based, trustless gambling gaming website, what is new is one where the founders come forward and cancel the ICO because they were not going to be able to satisfy investors. The following is from the Slot N Slot team: “At the current stage, we lack the confidence that the project can be a success, and enforcing the crowdsale in such conditions is an irresponsible decision. For this reason, we are retracting the crowdsale (ICO) for the project.” At least they were honest.

9. Centra Tech

US Boxing Champ Floyd Mayweather gave some PR to Centra Tech, which launched an ICO in the fourth quarter of 2017. It raised nearly $32 mln. However, the founders and owners of Centra Tech are being changed by the SEC for selling unregistered securities. The charges were brought when the SEC discovered the company has no agreement with either MasterCard or Visa to support their prepaid cards (there were part of their business model) and also for having falsified impressive biographies and creating false or misleading marketing materials. The SEC won this round by technical knockout.

10. Ahoolee

A search engine for products just does not seem like a good idea, when you can just search via a general search engine.  This was just a bad product with no interest. CEO Sergey Ryabov said in a statement that “We will repack the product. Perhaps we will rebrand it. Bring the globality of our idea to investors. We will conduct the pre-sale and ICO according to the usual market scheme, attracting large investors in advance. Actually, everything is just beginning!

While there are many more that failed, this was just a glimpse into why and how so many ICO fail after launch. The reasons behind the failures are the same ones that countless other business suffer from. While there is a lot of hype behind all the failures, don’t let this fool you, there are plenty of successes out there too.

You may find our ICO Reviews HERE

[Dany44]

Past-ICO Review: Kin the One You Didn’t See Coming



Seeking to take over the crypto economy with a messenger app, Kin is coming

Social media plays a major role in the modern lifestyle and since the creation of Facebook people are trying to find ways to monetize the interactions on social media, either by selling users’ information to advertisers. This has become the world we live in with the Internet being an intermediary for almost everything we do now and social media plays a big part.

Enter Kik, a Canadian social-chat app that runs on Kin to create an ecosystem that rewards developers and creators on its platform with valuable incentives leading to a quality user experience without using advertisements. Let’s look at the financials before we dig deeper into the technology.

In Black or Red it’s Hard to Tell

Kin ran a 14-day ICO from Sept. 12-26, 2017 and amassed an astounding $98 mln! It has a market cap of $144 mln and circulates 756 bln tokens out of a limited supply of 10 tln tokens. The current price per token is $0.000191 up from the introductory price of $0.0000093, which is about a 93 percent return on investment if you would have bought during the initial release.

ERC20 to change to Stellar

In an interesting turn of events, the ERC20 Kin token will be shifting over to the Stellar Lumens Blockchain. This was announced late in 2017 by CEO, Ted Livingstone. The changes have already started to appear. Kik Messenger has moved to fork Stellar while also developing its own Blockchain that would combine the best of Ethereum’s Blockchain as well as Stellar’s Blockchain to come up with a scalable proprietary network for Kin.

Trustless system to evolve

By using a permission-nodes based system, Kik has established a zero-fee Blockchain network that will eventually hand over control of the network to the users. This will be done by working with partners who will eventually own a large percentage of the trusted nodes. By this design, the development team at Kik hopes to develop a trustless ecosystem that truly decentralizes control of the platform. However, it should be noted that there is still room for error because if becoming a partner is based on holding a large amount of Kin tokens then there is a chance that only the rich. In terms of Kin token holdings, will be able to control the system and that is putting too much power in the hand of only a few which is a dangerous situation.

Goal to be most used crypto

The Kik messenger app debuted in 2010 and has some 300 mln registered users, of which 40 percent are US teenagers, according to TechCrunch.  With a group of people that large, it would be easy for Kin to become the most used cryptocurrency, if you have 300 mln users interacting with each other every day.

It will be interesting to see how younger users use Kik and Kin in conjunction with the messenger app, as most younger people don’t care about crypto, they just want a cool messaging app so they can chat with their friends and send goofy dog-face photos. There will, of course, be some major usage but if the majority of the users don’t care about Kin, does this become an all-for-nought enterprise? Time will tell Kik and Kin make the changeovers from Ethereum to the Stellar Lumens Blockchain. Moreover, the rewards engine is a big factor that can have a major impact how people will interact with the app. When the rewards start getting doled out in Q3 2018, behaviors may start changing when users start making some money.

You may find other Past ICO Reviews HERE